House-trained
MY Doo TULIP. By J. R. Ackerley. (Secker and Warburg, 10s. 6d.) MR. ACKERLEY'S Alsatian bitch Tulip is doubtless a delightful dog, but it would be embarrassing to meet her now that down to the rudest detail her every bodily function has been revealed in print. Presumably aimed at the novice dog-owner who is neither a sentimentalist nor a Pavlov, this book is obsessed with the elementary in canine behaviour. People who keep large bitches in small flats will sympathise with the author's apprehensions, yet one feels that these have assumed psychopathic proportions. Excretion, copulation and obstetrics are important, not only to Tulip, but to devote a book, other than a textbook, to them is carrying realism to the fringes of pornography. A life, even a dog's, has other facets.
When not engaged in intimate revelations, few of which will come as a surprise to the casual observer (though some emphati- cally do), Mr. Ackerley writes with enormous charm and humour. Tulip's suitors, from the well-bred Max who behaves like an old-fashioned butler, to the mongrel who finally wins her favours, are delightfully described, as are their acolytes, the vets, colonels and spivs to whom Mr. Ackerley confides his feverish anxieties. But engrossed in his dog to the point of seeming to have dis- covered the species, he errs too far in supposing that his readers will be as enchanted as he with all of Tulip's achievements. It is not a question of leaving things to our' imagination so much as of assuming that we have never seen a dog. To dedicate a whole chapter, however amusingly written, to puddles, is perhaps rather arrogant? Bewitched by his bitch, Hantic to understand and please her, made haggard by her love-life, Mr. Ackerley, as possessed as a research professor and as humorously gifted as they come, plants the beautiful Tulip in a redolent manure
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